We bumped in to the theatre today.

Bump-in is Hero Day.

Anyone who gets through bump-in day qualifies really. We had lots of people from different shows in the space today and they were all brilliant. Working together with everyone is always hard but it's great fun and it's rewarding and you get to see everyone else doing their thing.

But from my perspective, someone always emerges from left field as a total hero, out of nowhere. The bump-in hero. It's kind of like moving house, only there's a Good Fairy who turns up and saves the day. Someone always arrives with a drill or a trailer or a tray full of coffees or a cheque for nine thousand dollars.

Okay, a tray full of coffees.

I don't even know who bought me my second coffee today. All I know is that I came back from a rehearsal and there it was with "Sk C" written on the lid, piping hot and covered in chocolate.

Michael's friend Danielle was a hero. She turned up knowing nobody, set up the entire seating arrangement and disappeared without anyone noticing she'd even been there. She also copped an unnecessary amount of flak from Michael, I thought, personally, but then Michael is a strange boy.

And then there was Captain Hero, playing for Standing There Productions Parents' Association, introducing Rick Thorn.

Rick drove a huge van from Bendigo to Melbourne for the afternoon, where he was overwhelmed with love and thanks in the form of lots of heavy lifting and more driving. He then drove home.

Like most heroes, he flew in and out and disappeared without a trace.

What a legend. Officially bump-in hero.

Thank you Rick. Thank you Danielle. Thank you to whoever got me my coffee.

I'm going to bed.

Check this out. Paris Hilton as you've never seen her before:

Since I wrote the post below, people have commented that I've been very busy and they've asked whether anyone else is involved with the show at all.

Apparently other people are involved. I reluctantly turn this space over to them here.

These are just some of the (very sensible) people involved in For We Are Young And Free...

Emily (Genevieve) and Dylan (Dad) are very sensible indeed.

In fact, Emily is generally quite sensible:

She is in stripes. Miriam (Paris Hilton) is carrying her books, Michael (the guy who wrote the Australian anthem) is on the right and Dylan (Dad) has a cup of tea.

At least our producer, Rita Walsh, brings some maturity to the table.

(This is her - on the right - gossiping with Miriam).

And then finally, because there are no photos of the photographer anywhere, this is our design and publicity coordinator:

... Just so that you know you're in good hands.

This is me trying to write a script...

This is me trying to edit a script...

And this is the script now...

All of which makes me keeping a production diary kind of redundant, since these three photos tell the tale of the last six months better than I ever could. The only thing Stew didn't manage to photograph was the moment my hard drive crashed and I lost all my writing somewhere in between photograph two and photograph three. It's probably quite good there isn't a photograph of that. Just to finish off the series, here's a shot of me hanging around in the theatre we're going to be performing in this time tomorrow week...

I'm kind of subliminal and I look like I have one leg, but nevertheless it serves its purpose:

And the photo of me the morning after our closing night will not, I repeat not, be making it onto this (or any other website) ever. In the universe. In perpetuity.

One week, one day, one minute to go!

In a week, we'll be preparing for opening night.

The long list of things I have to do by next week will either be

a) done

b) discarded

c) extended and/or replaced by an extended family of other lists

I am quietly confident in predicting the latter.

By the way, a special hello to Andrew Blain. He knows why. Our nerdy little secret.

According to Wikipedia, a theatre director "is a principal in the theatre field who oversees and orchestrates the mounting of a play by unifying various endeavors and aspects of production".

Which is obviously a very helpful description when someone asks you, "What exactly does a director do?", which is a question I get asked surprisingly often.

I say surprisingly often because, to me, people should be asking what writers do. Writers are the the ones who spend a lot of their time deleting and redrafting and reading things and getting distracted and researching a completely redundant potential plot line and then cleaning out the entire fridge and organsing all their New Yorker magazines in chronological order with the fiction editions in a special section to the right of the...

Never mind.

Anyway. Wikipedia also divides theatre directors into types. The dictator, the negotiator, the creative artist and the confrontationalist.

They all sound like wankers to me. None of which helps me answer "What exactly does a director do?"

Anyway, fat lot of good the internet is. I looked up acting and I got this:

“Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing.”

Well anyone who has been on stage in August knows that isn't true.

Did you know Posh Spice's favourite food is still toast? That's your fact for the day. Just you WAIT until that piece of information surprises you when you're thinking about something else one day. Facts for the day are making me more and more lightheaded as the weeks pass. Only two weeks now until our comedy festival show, For We Are Young And Free. There are free tickets on our website and new photos although sadly none of the photos of me in rehearsals wearing my tracksuit pants made it on there. Can't imagine why not. You guys are really missing out. Maybe I should take some advice from Posh Spice: "I wear jeans more or less every day so it makes sense to me to spend that little bit more on something that my bottom will be relying on so much". My bottom has been relying on my jeans more than perhaps I realised. I like Paris Hilton more and more each day I read this Posh Spice book.